Has anyone else experienced repetitive lost connections, specifically using version 13 (FMP, FMPA, & FMS) & Maverick (10.9.x)? Our whole office has been late to the Maverick "party" and now I'm kinda glad. I am one of the first to go Maverick here (just got a new MBP Retina) and I am constantly losing connection to our FM servers. We have 3, each are version 13. I've tested about 4 different Macs on 10.9.x, using versions 12 & 13 (FMP & FMPA). 12 works great but 13 has connection drops on all 4 macs tested. I also tested 4 Macs on 10.8.5 using versions 12 & 13 (FMP & FMPA). Both work great under this scenario. It's just the combination of 13 & Mavericks that's the problem. All macs tested were wired ethernet but I really don't think it's the network. So, is this an isolated phenomena or have others battled this? I definitely welcome any suggestions.

Thanks Perren, hadn't thought to check Energy Saver. I'll report what I find, though I suspect they're not too different if not all the same. I'll also recheck the auto-disconnect settings but last time I looked, they were OK.

Come to think of it, this HAS happened to me a number of times, at first I thought it was a wifi dropout, but then I realised the connection was still active.... plus, I have also experienced the same thing with Ethernet. Not 100% sure if this was power/sleep related or not, but it has happened whilst working within FileMaker Pro (v 12). The two systems that I have seen it happen to are both multi-file solutions as well, in case that helps?

The trouble is, it's so random that I can not spend time trying to replicate this. It's simply not worth the time.

I have recently installed the latest 10.9.2 update, I'll keep you posted on how it behaves.

Not sure if it would be applicable to Filemaker, but I saw some issues related to Outlook. If you go to the main applicaiton icon in your applicaiton folder, and click Get Info. on Filemaker, Outlook, or any other applicaiton, there is an option that I was not aware of..."Prevent App Nap", which seems to resolve some disconnect issues. I would imagine it can impact any application that is running over the network.

The App Nap thing has a big impact if you are in the sharing environment.

On the sharing computer, if FileMaker is not the foreground window and App Napp is active (not prevented), then things slow down for all users. For example, the person on the sharing computer opens mail. The slowness to the other users of FileMaker is very very noticeable.

But, it just slows things down dramatically. I don't think we've noticed disconnects.

In the FMS environment, there is obviously no effect directly.

On clients in either shared or served environments, if FMP is not in the foreground, then any batch processing/reporting might slow down in the background, but we haven't noticed disconnects.

OK, All great suggestions here and thanks to all. I did check energy settings:

Display set to turn off after 1 hr.

Prevent computer from sleeping... is checked

Put hard disks to sleep...unchecked

Wake for Wi-Fi...unchecked

Enable power nap...unchecked

As for the "App Nap" option, I had already checked the box to "Prevent App Nap" for FMP & FMPA so I don't really think my particular issue was affected by this. I did however discover that my WiFi had gotten turned on...not sure how that happened as I never use WiFi at the office. But, once I turned it back off, everything seemed to go OK. Granted, I only got to test this for about 20 minutes as it was at the end of the day, but still, 20 minutes was longer than I had gotten the day earlier, before I experienced a drop.

Well, as it turns out, it's not having the WiFi on that's causing the problem. Had it off all day yesterday and I still had dropped connections. Here's what I have narrowed it down to: A few of our databases have, as additional external data sources, remote databases that are being served on FMS 12 at one of our customer's location. So far, every dropped connection has been while connected to a database served here on FMS 13 that has these external data sources that are served on FMS 12. However, other employees here at the office that are connected to the same database have no problems staying connected...but they are all "pre-Maverick". So, at this point, I'm thinking it's the combination of Maverick + FMP 13 + being logged into a local database that has these remote external data sources that are served on FMS 12. Boy, that's a mouthful!

Any similar configurations out there like this? If you have a moment or two, let me know what the stability of your connection is.

Wanted to follow-up on this as I still haven't found a solution and the problem continues. Anyone who is using FMP13 or FMPA13 together with the Maverick OS ( 10.9.x ) and FMS13 or FMSA13, would you mind revealing your server specs (hardware & server software)? All ours are virtual and use Windows Server 2008 R2 on Intel Xeon 2.93GHz processors with 144GB ram (4GB assigned to each virtual server) and storage is Iscsi Array Raid 6 with several terabytes.

When you say you are running virtual on this box, how many servers are you running? How many of them are FMS servers?

I'm wondering if the core issue here is that your FMS server(s?) CPU is just overloaded and starved for memory.

If you can, I would increase the amount of RAM on the server and allocate 8 gbytes to the FMS server. If the server box has multiple virtual servers running and only 4Gbytes of ram it is probably swapping memory out to disk. This will cause slow downs.

If I have the correct version of your CPU, this site shows the performance compared to current CPUs

I appreciate the response Bruce but according to VMware's monitoring app, it's no where near swapping out memory to disk because the real ram that is assigned to each virtual server is not being fully utilized as is. Just as a reminder, my issue is only with running filemaker 13 clients with Maverick and Filemaker Server 13. There are dozens of clients working happily on 13 under Mac OS 10.8.5 with no performance issues or lost connections. But I know sooner or later Maverick will be on all our Macs here. So I'd like to find out now what is causing the dropped connections.

Based on what you are saying, my guess is that this is not an FM13 or Mavericks issue. I think Mavericks part is probably a coincidence. Look for a common element, Like all systems being on the same Lan Switch. I have seen other e-mails like this when one or more computers had an intermittent connection issue. At one time I was an IT guy and responsible for several offices and 300 + computers and servers. So I saw a number of similar type problems.

Here is a list of some of them. Hopfully it will help you track it down.

1) Bad network interface on the Computer. Affected just 1 client.

2) Bad network interface on the server. Affected all clients.

3) New AC unit installed in next Office. Generated EMF noise. Affected users in the area. Lan cables ran near the unit and picked up the electronic noise.

4) 1 or more bad ports on Lan Switch. Affected computers connected to those ports.

Keep in mind that a lot of what a computer does on the network will continue to work on an intermittent connection. FileMaker Pro will have serious issues if the network has even a small interruption. So other apps may appear to be working correctly or just a tad slow while FileMaker is failing.

Well, the plot thickens or I'm a step closer to resolution. I discovered one of our production departments has moved to Mavericks so I "borrowed" a Mac to test on. It had Filemaker 13 on it so I connected to one of the FMP servers I was having the most the connection problems on my mac. It hummed along nicely for over 4 hours without one dropped connection. So, it's definitely not the server itself and apparently you're right about it not being Maverick or FMP13. Now, I'm inclined to think it's either a bad cable, switch, or network interface on my mac (though, my mac is only two weeks old). I did test other cables in my area and got the same result as the current cable connected to my mac so it seems like its pointing to the switch for our area. I'll let you know later when I'm at the office. Thanks for all your good suggestions, it helps getting practical insights from other experienced users.